Description:
The United States Postal Service celebrates the timeless beauty of angel’s trumpets with these new four-cent definitive stamps. With their large trumpet-shaped blossoms and distinctive sweet smell, angel’s trumpets are a summer favorite.
To create the image, photographer Harold Davis backlit the flowers on a light box and combined multiple photographic exposures, resulting in a luminous, transparent look. He also scanned a sheet of aged paper and, in post-production, added the scan as a background to the floral image.
“The point of this technique is to create a partially transparent effect using the colors that are passed through flower petals, rather than reflected by the petals, as is the case for most conventional flower photography,” Davis says.
Davis organized the flowers and leaves such that the four “trumpets” are seen pointing upward, not hanging down as they would be in nature. He says the arrangement was chosen after trying numerous arrangements and discovering that photographing them with the flowers facing down didn’t work visually. But the name of the plant inspired a solution.
“It occurred to me that the common name for Brugmansia included the word trumpet — that they looked like trumpets, and that I could emphasize this correspondence in how I set the image up,” Davis says.
While Davis does grow angel’s trumpets in his backyard, he found these flowers in his Berkeley, California, neighborhood. He says he has long been fascinated by angel’s trumpets and their “incredibly beautiful and large blossoms” and “unique shape.”
“In the right climate and location, this is an extremely vigorous grower with spectacular flowers that no longer exist in the wild, so it is a very special plant to cultivate,” Davis says.
Art director Ethel Kessler designed the stamp with an existing image by Harold Davis.